Shout Her Lovely Name

by Natalie Serber

  She never acknowledged Uncle Iggy looking out for her. She just took the juice, fries, and aspirin. When she remembered to thank him, after the party left, chattering like a flock of birds, and only a couple of boys in Marlon Brando T-shirts leaned toward each other at the opposite end of the bar, Uncle Iggy had already gone home. Ira was folding the boys’ tab into an origami crane to flutter down before them. Nobody wanted to go home alone.

  “I,” she said. “Give me a smoke?”

  He flicked the package of Salem cigarettes toward her, never shifting his gaze from the boys.

  She held on to the dime, standing in front of the pay phone for the length of the entire cigarette before placing her call. She imagined the abrupt jangle of the telephone in her mother’s kitchen. Her mom curled up beneath the blankets with her back to the window, her father’s old pipe propping it open. His side of the bed would be empty. He slept in a chair; better for his back, he claimed.

  “Hello.” It was her father’s gruff voice. The operator spoke in an official voice. Ruby closed her eyes. The last time she’d talked to her father, she’d told him she wasn’t coming home for the summer. “What?” He coughed one dry, deep cough, like a door slamming. “What’d you say?”

  “Will you accept a collect call from Ruby?”

  He cleared his throat and she felt hers constrict. The last time, he’d hissed about all he’d given up for her, who he’d given up for her.

  “Sir, will you accept the charges?”

  The last time, he’d said that because of her he was stuck in a shithole of a life and she couldn’t even come home to her own goddamned mother. Ruby spoke over the operator’s request. “Daddy, it’s me.” She pressed her free arm across her stomach. “Daddy, please.” He didn’t respond. “Get Mom.”

  “Sir?”

  “Get Mom,” she said, squeezing the phone in her hand.

  “I’m sorry, miss. I’m going to have to disconnect you.”

  “Don’t disconnect this phone.” She found she was sobbing. “Get Mom! Daddy, please.”

  “Sir, will you accept the charges?”

  “I’m pregnant.”

  “Sir?” Simultaneous with the words, his line clicked off.

  Her forehead pressed against the wall, Ruby held on to the quiet phone. After a moment, the operator asked, “Miss? Is there anyone else I can connect you with?” Her voice had gone soft, conciliatory. Now someone else knew.

  Ruby could hear Ira and the two boys laughing and charming the pants off one another at the bar. When she finally returned the receiver to its cradle, her dime clattered into the coin box.

  Ruby slid a rag down the bar top, stopped beside Ira. He was singing and performing a little merengue step in front of the cash register, making change for the cigarette machine.

  “Those two are delicious.” He drew her attention to the two boys with big white smiles, the seams of their forearms, the flesh pressed against flesh.

  “Which one do you like?” she whispered.

  Ira gestured with his chin toward the blond. “I think I’m in love.”

  “I’ll see what I can do for your cause.” Before she stepped their way, she kissed Ira on the cheek. “Thanks for the party.” The phone call was something she couldn’t talk about just yet.

  Ruby plucked a bottle of vodka from the well, poured shots for the boys and for herself. “Drinks?” She removed her bolero jacket and stood before them in her white blouse. “You have no idea about my day.” She exaggerated the task of unclasping her bra through the cheap silky fabric, then slipped a hand inside the neckline, over her collarbone, easily sliding the strap over her elbow and wrist. She repeated the gesture with the other strap and slowly extricated her pink lace bra from her sleeve. “Much better.” She sighed.

  The dark-eyed boy held his lighter and an unlit cigarette. “Are you a magician’s assistant?”

  “What shall we drink to?” she asked, taking the cigarette and holding it in the flame. She blew the smoke out the side of her mouth, away from the longest eyelashes she had ever seen wasted on a man.

  He paused, held up his glass, and said, “There are no little things.”

  “At least, not among present company,” Ira said, coming over. On the cusp of blitzed, he clinked heartily with the blond’s shot glass and swallowed his vodka down.

  “Nothing counts, right?” Ruby closed her eyes, brought her glass to her lips, and flung her head back dramatically. She didn’t care about anything. With Mr. Eyelashes watching, she held her head back longer than necessary and then stroked the empty shot glass down her neck and chest. When she finally lowered her head and opened her eyes, he would be staring at her.

  His blond friend had been denied the forearm contact but Ira was leaning in, eagerly filling the vacuum.

  Stepping backward along the bar, her dime still in her hand, she sashayed out onto the dance floor and slipped the coin into the jukebox.

  Mr. Eyelashes followed and they danced to Percy Faith.

  “So, are you ready for summer to end?” he asked, his lips brushing against her ear.

  “Shh.” She held her finger in front of his soft mouth. “Do you like girls or boys?”

  He pressed against her, entwined his fingers with hers, and despite tender breasts, Ruby pressed back. “I’m flexible,” he answered.

  Even in the smoky bar she could smell his aftershave, toasty, like buttered popcorn and rum. He’d applied it for someone else, and now it was for her. She decided she needed him to kiss her before the song ended.

  “I like the way you smell,” she said.

  He leaned down; his lips were thin and he pushed his tongue past her teeth. The surprising thing was how cold his mouth felt inside. “What about the way I taste?”

  “Nothing I can’t fix.” She kissed him again, slowly warming his mouth with her tongue. “Now you taste like me.”

  They left the Pond hand in hand and walked through the alley toward her hotel. The air was thick enough to chew, the way it got after a storm. Rotting orange peels and wet cardboard cartons scented the night, made it seem lush, alive.

  “It smells like cells are dividing all around us.”

  “Which are you, a magician’s assistant or a scientist?” he asked.

  She laughed, bitter and forced as a whip crack. The sound alarmed her. Worried she might frighten him away, she squeezed his hand and didn’t let go. Once at her room, they wasted no time undressing, were quickly, suddenly naked together on her bed, groping and thrusting, two strangers pleasing themselves. She never once opened her eyes, and when they were finished, he fell asleep. Ruby stayed awake a long time, looking out the window at the cars in the parking lot. Four people wandered down the sidewalk singing “Jingle Bells.” A bottle smashed and they laughed. A sliver of moon drifted out from behind the clouds, its light reflected off the wet pavement. She hoped sex would bring on cramps, though she knew that, along with everything else she had tried, this would not make her bleed. This was happening to her.

  Much later in the night, he pulled her toward his warm body.

  “You’re cold,” he whispered. Holding her in his arms, he kissed her softly. “Hey, it’s okay. I promise, everything will be okay.”

  Free to a Good Home

  On the way back from Chinatown, they stopped to share a carton of kung pao pork on an abandoned sofa. FREE TO A GOOD HOME claimed a torn cardboard sign. With an unflattering grunt, Ruby lowered herself down, then lifted her swollen feet onto the ugly tweed cushions. Marco, dropping peanuts from the chopsticks into his open mouth, circled the couch and kicked the curved wooden legs as if he were testing tires. Aside from a large cigarette burn and a certain wilted-cabbage awfulness, the couch was fine, and he saw no reason not to drag it home to their apartment. For months Ruby and Marco had been collecting abandoned furniture off the sidewalks of New York City. Ruby also picked up odds and ends at secondhand stores, things she found on her own while Marco worked at his new job, insurance adjuster, in an uncle�
��s office. They filled their three rooms with battered mahogany dining chairs, a lime-green Formica table, and a utility-wire spool they used as a coffee table. The only new item they owned—a Humpty Dumpty lamp—Ruby’s mother had purchased with nine Green Stamp books. Ruby called what they were doing nesting. When Marco called it temporary, she assumed he was referring to the furnishings.

  He flipped the burned cushion and then stepped back, squinting at the sofa and at pregnant Ruby. He had long legs, wide shoulders, and a solid neck, yet he was surprisingly thin. In college Marco had wanted to play football but was unable to gain the twenty-two pounds the coach insisted on before he would put him out on the field. Now Marco thought his admirable physique would serve him well onstage, which was another reason he and Ruby were in New York, for him to pursue this new dream. Ruby squinted back at him. Even through the haze of her eyelashes, his face seemed hard, eyebrows like dark gashes on his forehead, high cheekbones, and a hatchet-straight nose, all of it unreadable. All but his deep red lips, slick with oil; they were curved, tender, and generous. She hoped their child got his lips.

  “It’s functional,” he said.

  “It’s scratchy.” Everything made Ruby itch. Her skin was stretched to capacity, taut and dry over her belly, tight over her expanded thighs. Even her ankles itched.

  He gestured for her to move her feet and then plunked down beside her. “We’ll wait.” What he meant was, they’d wait for someone to help them get the sofa off the street. And of course help would walk by; Marco had that kind of luck. He’d always had that kind of luck—winning door prizes, finding five dollars in the gutter, suffering only sprains. Marco inhabited a generous universe. Now that they were living together, soon to marry, Ruby wondered if she could claim some of his luck as her own. After all, Marco had called her when he returned from his summer abroad. They’d decided, together with both sets of parents, that under the unfortunate circumstances, it would be best to move to New York and make a go of it. Her mother was relieved that the move put Ruby near her aunt and uncle—just in case. Ruby would not be alone. And surely constant proximity to Marco gave Ruby some license to his luck.

  After twenty minutes, two teenage boys eagerly accepted three dollars and half a pack of Lucky Strikes to drag the sofa two blocks to their apartment. Ruby waddled behind. Her hips had grown so wide she supposed there really was no other way to describe her walk, though the first time Marco said it, he hurt her feelings. Twilight rushed at them along with the throng of office workers. Streetlights came on; hatted men, clutching briefcases and their girls’ elbows, hurried for cabs or for the subway, hurried toward cocktail hour and dinner, toward life after work. The women wore suits with tight skirts and pumps that reminded Ruby of the shoes her aunt had sent from Bergdorf’s when Ruby went away to college. She wondered about office life and belts. Would she ever wear a belt again? A young man in a brown suit, the same color as their new sofa, held a cab door for his date, his hand guiding the small of her back. He slid in beside her, tossed his cigarette into the gutter with the candy wrappers, a tattered page from the Times, and the last of the autumn leaves.

  Soon it would snow. Drifts would entomb the tree trunks, and she and Marco would have the baby. She imagined holding an infant, looking out the window at the quiet street, the snow absorbing the sound of traffic, reflecting light, remaking the world, clean and new. Behind her on the stove, a yellow kettle would whistle, ready to warm the baby’s bottle. When she thought of the months ahead, that was the fullest moment she could imagine, clear light, the whistle from the kettle, the baby real in her arms. The two of them, alone in the apartment. Today the November light fell pale and flat, as if the entire day was flu-ish. She scooped the last of the rice into her mouth, burped up spicy pork. Kung pao was Marco’s favorite.

  The sofa was preposterously large, and even among the menagerie of accumulated furniture in their living room, it was awkward. Again, Ruby spent the evening home alone. She arranged a chenille bedspread over the sofa and shoved it from one wall to another, heaving against its bulk with the backs of her thighs. Her belly was too big, and the sofa too unwieldy, to move it any other way. Marco came home late from auditions most nights, his shirt smelling of smoke, his breath sweet and medicinal, like mouthwash. If anyone knew the smell of a bar, it was Ruby. For now, it was enough that he came home at all. It was only late at night, when he returned and sat on the edge of their bed, removing his shoes in the dark, that she was brave enough to mention the future.

  “Classifieds have plenty of secretarial jobs.”

  He held her ankle, his fingers firm against her skin.

  “We can pay someone, or maybe my aunt could help out.”

  “Meep,” he said. She never knew why or where the name came from, she was just Meep. Like a private joke he had with himself. Now when he said it, his voice was a cocktail of frustration and resentment. “Meep. It’s not my time.” He just wasn’t ready. And neither was she. They could stay together, keep trying, if it was just the two of them. “I brought papers. From an agency. Someone I know knows someone who used them. They have good families.” He loved her, he said. Yes, he did. He had made an appointment. This is what he hoped for.

  His hand grew tight around her ankle, shifted from reassuring to insistent to forceful, his fingers sinking into her swollen flesh. She would say anything to bring him beneath the blankets beside her. The truth was, the only thing that terrified Ruby more than the idea of giving up the baby was the idea of giving up Marco. No matter what, she lost.

  Now she had the sofa lodged in front of the window. She was acting out her mother’s game, as if finding the exact sweet spot for the sofa was the key to everything working out. Sally had been rearranging the furniture back at home for the past five years, lighting one cigarette off the butt of the last. Ruby wanted a cigarette too, but Marco had given the last of theirs to the boys who wrestled the sofa up the stairs. She tucked the bedspread beneath the cushions, just so. A weighty exhaustion swept up from the soles of her bare feet, overtaking her, as if someone, her mother, was pressing her down with hot, heavy hands, ironing her flat onto the furniture. This is how a doorstop must feel, dull and immovable. She pulled their sun-baked curtains closed, the fabric so brittle in her hands her fingernail pushed through, as easily as paper. Ruby dragged her fingernail all the way down, one long satisfying slit. Pregnancy had made her nails strong. She gave herself frequent manicures, filing them into ovals and polishing them icy pink. She pushed her nail through again, another long slit, then another, and another, shredding the curtains. More than anything, she wanted to be free of this crappy apartment, free of her huge body, out with Marco, drinking a Manhattan in Manhattan.

  When she woke in the dark with a fist clenching inside of her, she knew it was too soon. First she tried holding perfectly still, as if she could trick the pains into stopping, and for a time they did. But when the gripping started again, she sat up, lay back down, rolled over, and tucked a pillow between her thighs. She kept rearranging herself on the sofa until the clenching fist turned into a hot vise. Maybe peeing would help. On the toilet, Ruby curled herself around the pains, and that was the first place she cried out. Her voice, a sharp yelp in the tiny bathroom, terrified her. Marco wasn’t even home yet. She hadn’t made any kind of a decision. She paced the apartment, went back to the sofa, drew her knees to her enormous belly until that too became unbearable. Where was Marco?

  “Please,” she panted as another pain gripped her low back. “I’m not ready. Stop.”

  Brakes hissed on the street below their window, a panel-truck door rattled open, and a stack of newspapers thumped onto the sidewalk. It was the thump that made her scream. The thump of morning. Marco still wasn’t home, and when the next pain slammed into her, she felt a warm gush between her legs.

  The nun wrapped a hot-water bottle in flannel and denied her codeine. Her thick, practical fingers massaged Ruby’s belly. The fundus, she called it. Apparently having the baby didn’t chang
e everything; Ruby’s fundus bulged and surged with cramps as if it held a life of its own, as if she hadn’t given birth two days ago. Marco had found Ruby on all fours, huffing and crying in the center of their apartment. His face went pale when he saw blood on her nightgown, and he kept repeating “I’m sorry,” as if it made a difference. Down the stairs of their third-floor walkup, waiting for the cab and driving uptown: “I’m so sorry. I’m sorry.” He brought her into St. Vincent’s, his arm wrapped around her wide waist, his face ashen. “Where were you?” she whispered. The doctors induced twilight sleep, and Ruby felt herself peeling away, as if she were a felt cutout of a woman, no longer a part of the story.

  “Your baby is perfect,” Sister Joseph said. “Sometimes we have to worry about breathing and sucking with preemies, but your daughter is healthy. A little small, but healthy.” She smoothed blankets, staring at Ruby while she spoke, hitting the words preemies and daughter with extra verve.

  Ruby squeezed her eyes shut. “Why is your name Joseph?” She twisted her fingers in the frayed satin edge of her blanket. The sofa was the reason. The damn sofa and how it wouldn’t fit right in the apartment. It had brought on labor three weeks early. Three weeks she needed to make Marco fall irrevocably in love with her and the idea of their baby. The sofa had put her in this hospital bed, unrecognizable, alone. Beneath her hospital gown, her own breasts—nearly blue with crisscrossing veins, engorged as if two extra heads had been stuck to her chest—shocked her. Sister Joseph wrung out hot diapers and laid them over Ruby’s chest. She gave her pills to dry up her milk and instructed Ruby to clasp her hands on top of her head while she wound Ace bandages around and around, pressing Ruby’s nipples flat beneath the truss.